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Why we need more conservative madrassas

Question Time: celebrating the cosy consensus

Watching another dismal episode of the BBC’s Question Time last week, I realised why British politics is in such a dire state. It’s because the language of debate has been hijacked so comprehensively by the liberal left that not even conservatives dare speak up for right-wing views any more for fear of being dismissed as extremist.

By “right wing” I don’t mean anti-semitic, xenophobic, “racist”, “sexist” or any of the other glib caricatures routinely imposed on us by the left. I simply mean believing, as I do, that a society is at its most fruitful, happy and successful when individuals are left free to live their lives unburdened by all but the bare minimum of taxation or regulation, where time-honoured traditions and institutions (be they the family, or the church or the military) are cherished, where politicians are our servants not our masters, and where equality of opportunity may be a desirable thing – but DEFINITELY not equality of outcome.

What liberal-left organisations like the BBC have managed very successfully to do is frame the debate in such a way that such opinions aren’t even up for discussion. On Question Time last week, for example, the first question (given unfeasibly large quantities of impossibly boring airtime by the complicitous chairman David Dimbleby) was about Michael Ashcroft and Tory party funding; another was about one of the killers of James Bulger; another was about the Chilcott inquiry. None of them enabled any of the panel seriously to address any of the major problems facing our country today. The Bulger one was merely an opportunity for a bit of tabloid-columnist-style moral posturing. The other two were essentially about political process.

Political process is solely a left-liberal preoccupation. For libtards it is an article of faith that political activity of any kind must perforce be a good thing because it involves two of their favourite things – government intervention and changing the status quo. What libtards don’t like is big ideas – liberty; empiricism; small state; low taxation . That’s because these are right-wing arguments which they will always lose. Hence their tendency to shut down the debate whenever they can by shifting the argument ad hominem.

I’ve noticed this same technique much in use in the student-rag left-liberal blogosphere, of late, over the small matter of the Young Britons Foundation. Because the YBF’s splendid, funny and ideologically sound chairman Donal Blaney has called his organisation a “madrassa” for young conservatives, Guardianistas and redbrick-junior-common-room-Spartists have seized on it as evidence is that the YBF is some kind of borderline terrorist organisation. Eh? As I mentioned earlier, I addressed the YBF in the Commons last week, and extremist is the very last word I’d use to describe them. “Not nearly extremist enough” would be my preferred definition of these pallid young politicos. These kids have been so effectively brainwashed by the propaganda of socialists like Ken Livingstone, Tony Benn, Ken Clarke, Dave Cameron et al, they actually think “progressive” means something worthwhile and that “investment” is what you do when you squander money you haven’t got on the least efficient healthcare system in the known universe.

As I said to them last week, “Unless you understand why it is that conservatism is the ONLY political philosophy that works, unless you are capable of appreciating – and explaining – why it is not merely the philosophy of self-interest and expediency but also the one which leads to by far the happiest outcomes for by far the most people, then there is NO POINT IN YOUR BEING A ****ING CONSERVATIVE at all.”

There is not much we can do to change the BBC insidious leftism, unfortunately. But what we can try to do is restore some backbone to conservatism and – if this is what the YBF is trying to do then we should applaud it. Until conservatives can learn to stop being embarrassed about their ideology, Broken Britain is never going to be fixed.